By Babz Rawls Ivy, Inner-City News & LoveBabz LoveTALK/WNHH Radio
JACK Quartet, a multi-GRAMMY-nominated string group, is performing its collaboration with
composer and winner of the 2020 Ernst von Siemens Composers’ Prize Catherine Lamb at YaleSchwarzman Center Dec. 1. The piece, “divisio spiralis, is a richly unique sonic experience with roots in synesthesia.”
For the upcoming performance in New Haven, JACK Quartet has partnered with Lamb, a composer known for exploring the interaction of tone, summations of shapes and shadows, forming a central artistic relationship that pushes forward the creative work of both the composer and quartet.
In reference to “divisio spiralis,” Lamb has explained synesthesia with numbers as a precursor to creating the piece. “The first time I discovered Erv Wilson’s 1965 organization of the overtone series as a logarithmic spiral, the image immediately resonated with me as a lucid means to describe harmonic space as numbers in repetition and interaction, generating/ blooming outwards with each new prime and composite. I absorbed this image while working on the piece for JACK…” she wrote in in the liner notes for her 2022 CD “Aggregate Forms.”
“It’s very meditative and slow to unfold even though when I’m playing it, it feels very active and on the edge of sound,” Richards said about “divisio spiralis.”
JACK Quartet has spent their careers honoring classical music from the 20th century while creating the sounds of the 21st century by commissioning and collaborating with artists.
“Even though we are classically trained in Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, we are really driven by this passion and desire to work with living composers,” said John Pickford Richards, violist for JACK Quartet.
Richards shared that the JACK Quartet strives to provide opportunities for current composers since their art is a touchpoint for what is culturally relevant in modern times. An interesting experience working in modern day is that the group can look to the past and create an entirely new kind of music.
“We arrange medieval and renaissance music that we think is kind of strange and peculiar and we arrange it for a string quartet since string quartets weren’t really in existence back then,” Richards said. “What’s cool about exploring really old music is that composers back then were lawless with the way they wrote music.”
The JACK Quartet was founded in 2005 and they are the Quartet in Residence at The New School in New York City. Their performance at Yale Schwarzman Center is free and open to the public.
photo credit for both is to Shervin Lainez.
John Pickford Richards from JACK Quartet was a guest on LoveBabz LoveTALK 11/16/2023
https://www.facebook.com/wnhhradio/videos/915868579959144/?mibextid=YxdKMJ
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